Why your brand needs modular content

Digital content marketing has changed dramatically over the past decade. Once a top-of-the-funnel ecommerce concern almost exclusively for the marketing department, it now involves stakeholders from multiple departments, and serves the customer experience from end to end. 

That means businesses require a constant influx of content to meet business needs across their digital infrastructure, from conventional sales and marketing, to training, education, customer service, social media, and more. Adding to the challenge is the issue of flexibility: content needs to be published across multiple digital channels, including desktops, mobiles, and tablets, while content production needs to scale quickly to match business growth or the latest market trends. 

But while the need for content has exploded, the content management process hasn't always kept pace — and firms that haven’t updated their legacy content management systems (CMS) have often found their content teams limited by inflexible features and functionalities, and working twice as hard to meet new demand. 

This new landscape requires a new approach to content management, one that simplifies the production and publication process, while accounting for the increased complexity and reach of the content marketing ecosystem. For many organizations, that new approach is modular content.  

Modular content represents a different way of thinking about, and working with, content — but for brands still relying on a monolithic CMS, the concept might need an introduction. 

In this post, we’re going to explain what modular content is, how it solves the challenges that legacy CMSes can’t, and how switching to modular content creation could deliver benefits for your marketing team. 

What is modular content?

Modular content refers to the way that content is stored, structured, and deployed, within a content management system. In a modular content architecture, digital content itself is broken down into its component parts, which can then be joined together — like building blocks — to create new pieces of content.

For example, under a modular content strategy, rather than a fixed block of code, a blog becomes a collection of components: a header, an author bio, body text, images, a CTA, and so on. And those parts can be used or reused in different contexts, to build different pieces of content. 

A modular content strategy is so useful to brands because it offers complete freedom and flexibility to create and publish content quickly and easily, across any digital channel, bypassing the friction of the format. 

To get to grips with the value of modular content, let’s take a look at the alternative. 

The monolithic content problem

Legacy CMSes are referred to as “monolithic” because they tightly couple their backend administrative layer with their frontend presentation layer — which is also known as the “head.” In a monolithic CMS, content is completely tangled up in its underlying code, and so anyone who wants to upload new content, or make changes, needs to know how to unpick that code without disrupting surrounding formatting. 

That makes content management challenging since new blogs, images, product pages, and any other freshly created content need to be altered to fit into pre-formatted channels and can't be readily repurposed — all of which increases the effort necessary to create and maintain content. In a fast-moving marketing environment, a monolithic CMS might struggle to keep up with changes in the market, or to scale to meet new customer demand. 

The solution to those monolithic content challenges is to go headless. 

The headless CMS solution

Headless content management systems don’t have a frontend presentation layer. You build the customer-facing head of your tech stack yourself, handling communication with the back end via an application programming interface (API). 

A headless CMS provides the foundation for a modular content strategy. With no assumptions about what content will look like on your website, or on any other digital channel, and no risk of coding complications when you upload, you’re free to take any approach you like when building out the functionalities of your front end. 

That means doing whatever you like with your content — including implementing a CMS which uses a modular content model. 

Modular content empowers everyone

Contentful is a content platform that’s an evolution of the headless CMS. It also serves as a modular content platform, in the sense that it enables brands to use the structural components of their content to build any kind of content experience.

Within Contentful, content components are assigned an identifying layer that describes what role they play on the page — header, image, text, and so on — and how they relate to other components. Managed in a unified content hub, those content modules fit together to form larger content blocks, according to predefined rules. 

For example, a hero banner might require an H1 title and an image, while a full blog post might require a hero banner, body text, and an author bio. Other modular content examples include a call to action (CTA), which may be made up of a line of body text and a link, or a product review, made up of a product image, star-rating widget, and brief text description. The list goes on.

Because modular content components are removed from any channel-specific layout or code, they can be used and reused endlessly, as part of any content structure, across multiple channels within a brand’s digital ecosystem. There’s no need to continuously create new content for different pages, or tediously cut and paste sections of existing content onto different pages. Instead, you simply select your modular components, and connect them to spin up new pages quickly. 

The sheer possibilities of modular content creation are what make a platform like Contentful so effective for modern marketing teams — whether they’re working to get on top of a content backlog, tailor content for multiple platforms, or deliver new, exciting content experiences for customers.

Let’s drill down into the key benefits you can expect from a modular content strategy.

The advantages of a modular content strategy

Autonomously publish and make changes to content

In a modular content platform, content and other design elements are located in a unified content hub, entirely separate from the development pipeline, and available for easy use and reuse. 

That means editors can preview and publish new content, or update existing content, without any need to consult a developer. The same goes for writers, designers, artists, and marketers, who can focus on creating modular content, and on brand voice and quality, rather than the logistics of content management. That ease and efficiency ultimately enhances both internal user experiences, and adds consistency to customer browsing experiences. 

Create localized pages quickly

If you need to work with content in multiple languages, while coordinating with multiple teams, your developers can set up content locales for different locations. You can then integrate new tools to the content platform to handle local text translations (or assign that task to local content teams), while international team members can be granted access to the relevant content they need for their locale, without interfering with anyone else’s work.

In other words, a modular approach makes it easier, and faster, to expand into new locations while maintaining consistency of voice for global content elements.   

Scale content experiences easily

Modular content makes it easier to build and maintain new content, but also to create new experiences and customer touchpoints from existing content. For example, if you want to create a microsite for a specific sales promotion, it might be the case that 80% of the content you need for that already exists somewhere within your infrastructure and could be reused,  in modular parts, for that effort. 

For large multinational companies, having a modular approach to content allows them to scale globally across different marketing teams and brands because that content can be shared and stitched together. That potential opens up the potential for collaboration between different autonomous markets, or marketing teams, and allows a global content strategy to trickle down to autonomous marketing teams. 

Optimize content and landing pages for SEO

Since Contentful is extensible by nature, it’s easy to add SEO tools to help nontechnical users optimize content. That’s because modular CMSes break content down to its basic generic data (text, image, json, etc.), and so any external tools that you choose to plug into your framework don’t need know the format you’re using to create and store content — and they automatically know what to do with any text they’re given.

For example, Surfer SEO is a tool that enables brands to easily optimize their content for search, with auto-generated guidelines for content length, structure, keywords, and so on. By integrating Surfer SEO, you’ll be able to make your content much more visible to potential visitors, and achieve higher SERP rankings.   

In short, the flexibility and extensibility of the modular content model empowers users across an organization to quickly optimize content for customer searches, without developer assistance.

Launch new campaigns faster

On a modular content platform, developers don’t have to wrestle with rigid CMS architecture, babysit aging infrastructure, or build the same functionalities from scratch for each new digital product release. Instead, developers can focus on creating new digital experiences, shipping new products, and maximizing content value. Meanwhile, content creators, editors, and marketers can work in parallel, managing content autonomously from their modular content library without any need for developer hand-holding. 

That freedom translates to better ecommerce outcomes, including streamlined workflows for team members in the back end and the front end, increased overall pipeline speed, and reduced time to market. 

Perform A/B testing and optimize content as needed

In a legacy CMS, A/B testing typically requires significant developer involvement — not least for the creation and management of multiple landing pages and digital experiences. Testing and personalization tools sit on top of frontend code, which slows down page speed and frustrates users. This means testing monolithic environments can be a particularly slow, cumbersome process, and results can often come too late to make an impact.

With a modular approach, testing is a lot easier since developers can run experiments on individual building blocks of content before they reach the frontend application, and so there are no negative effects on the website, or on user experiences. 

This means that marketers (and other nontechnical users) can launch multiple versions of digital experiences, and test and optimize them without disrupting wider content. For example, with Ninetailed by Contentful, you can perform A/B tests on different personalized experiences with ease, and use AI-powered insight to develop the most effective tests. This approach also makes things easier for editors, who don’t have to log into multiple tools, and can do everything from within the Contentful interface, because they’re simply creating multiple versions of the generic building blocks they created in the first place.  

Omnichannel opportunities

The limitations of monolithic content don’t just cause complications for website formatting, but for content published on any digital channel. Modular content production doesn’t have that problem: with the front end decoupled from the back end, content is completely channel and code agnostic, since an API handles the transfer of data between layers and apps. 

In practice, this means marketers can use and reuse content wherever they need to across different digital channels. A product description, for example, written for a website, could be quickly transposed, without formatting issues, onto a mobile app, a smartwatch, a store display, or anywhere else in the content ecosystem. 

Build modular content experiences with Contentful 

The content marketing landscape isn’t slowing down and your brands need more than just creativity and ambition to keep up — you need a content platform that enables you to deliver quality, at scale, across a complex digital landscape. 

Contentful not only gives you the tools to do that, but to design and create modular content experiences, piece by piece, with confidence. You can start your modular content journey on the Contentful Marketplace, where you’ll discover an ecosystem of apps and services to kickstart your project

Whether you want to create your website with Next.js, build your payment process around Shopify ecommerce, or use Contentful itself for content management, we’ll help you connect the pieces, and shape the content experiences that will drive your business forward. 

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